It’s been a while since the last of my SAW II blogs (note that it’s not “2”, it’s “II” per the official Lions Gate decree) disgraced the virtual pages of JoBlo.com and Arrowinthehead.com, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to update you all.

I left Toronto tonight just as we were finishing up the sound mix on SAW II. Bousman has been bouncing off the walls of the mix stage, yelling at anyone who would listen that “my man Charlie Clouser busted out his ‘A’ game on this score!” And indeed, Clouser has done it again and given the film its signature raw, industrial, yet melodic vibe. The one thing I noticed about this score versus the original SAW is that there seems to be more guitar in this one than in the first.

Also, he’s created a couple of new themes to go along with the ones already familiar to the SAW army out there. There is a soundtrack album coming out just before the October 28th release of the film, but other than end title songs by Mudvayne and Queens of the Stone Age, the rest of the source music in the film is blended almost organically into the score, so you’ll have to be listening carefully to hear Marilyn Manson, The Used and Puscifer (featuring Maynard from Tool), among others.

After spending close to five months in Toronto – a GREAT city to work in, by the way, and a great city to party in, especially in the summer months – it was only fitting that Darren Bousman and I leave our good neighbors to the north in style. In typical fashion, what started out as a promising night, quickly became what we now call –THE STRANGEST NIGHT EVER. Here’s a brief recap.

For several days, my man Bousman, who now has a modicum of game with the ladies as a result of his 6 month stay in Toronto under the expert tutelage of myself and my partners Oren Koules and Mark Burg, had been calling me multiple times an hour talking about some party he got us invited to for something called “The Suicide Girls.”

For those of you unaware of what the Suicide Girls are, it’s a loosely-knit group of about 800 tattooed, pierced rocker and punk chicks who do erotic photo sets on a website (see it here) and travel around the U.S. and Canada doing burlesque shows and creating mayhem. Personally, I prefer my dirty girls to be…well….cleaner… but Bousman has a real fetish for the nasty rocker type.

My plan for the night was simple – act as Bousman’s pimp, draw attention to the fact that he directed the sequel to SAW to give him some cred, and then stay close by in case he started saying anything stupid or inappropriate.

Bousman had been building this party up in his mind for days and convinced himself he was going to meet “the future ex Mrs, Bousman” at this event. We brought along our sound-effects editor Mark, who is quite possibly the darkest, dirtiest most subversive human I’ve ever met, knowing he, too, would enjoy a night of trying to pick-up filthy rocker whores.

So it was a sad sad day when we walked into the club and discovered a half-filled room, about five bottom-of-the-barrel Suicide Girls and a sad aneroxic-looking waitress passing around shots of Jagermeister. The only attractive girl in the place, who we quickly learned was a lesbian, even stated as she watched three skanks dancing poorly on the makeshift stage, “this shit is enough to make me hetero again.”

I should have heeded the warning signs and called it a night when Bousman spent about 30 minutes chatting up a punked-out girl sitting on a bar stool before he realized SHE HAD NO ARMS AND LEGS! (I swear on my children this is true) But no, I was a man on a mission. Bousman wanted a dirty girl, Bousman was going to get a dirty girl.

Needless to say, I immediately went into back-up mode. Unfortunately, my back-up plan was on a girls-only, “no cock allowed” night, so I began to get agitated. How could we salvage this night? I did what any man would do – suggested we go to a nearby strip club. If we couldn’t meet dirty girls, we could at least pay dirty girls to be nice to us!

We walked three or four blocks in the rain to one of the high-end strip clubs in town. After the nastiness of the Suicide Girls party, we needed to see some quality and even on a rainy Tuesday night, there was no shortage of ladies willing to relieve me of as many $20’s as possible. I smoothly slipped the host/security dude a $20 and told him to put us in a private room and send over three of the finest ladies he had.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. After buying several rounds of drinks, the girl dancing for me bailed when one of her regulars walked in. The girl Darren had on his lap was nice enough to go out into the club and find me a replacement. While Annie, the replacement, was cute as could be, within moments she had cut her knee on a small shard of glass embedded in the booth, and moments later began telling me about a dream she had the night before wherein she apparently grew a second asshole. Okkkkaaayyyy……

By now it was clear that the stars just weren’t lined up right, but Bousman was in lapdance heaven and who was I to deny him pleasure? He’d busted his ass for me and made one hell of a movie. I owed him something. Just then the door to the room opened and in walked a woman -- at least we thought it was a woman -- who we now refer to as “Thor.” Thor had the deepest voice I’ve ever heard on a woman and was obviously drunk as hell.

She pointed at me and said “You need me to dance for you.” At this point she ran across the room, shoved Annie out of the way leaped into the air and slammed her knees down on my thighs as hard as she could. Bousman and Mark then proceeded to watch in horror as Thor repeated this slamming move over and over for the duration of the song, then asked if I wanted another dance!

I screamed in horror and ran from the room. A guy has got to know when to wave the white flag. Clearly, it was a signal that it was time to go home and start thinking about ideas for SAW 3 … or should I say “III.” Yeah, that’s right. I said it. SAW III.

Are you guys ready for a SAW 3? the last two blog posts have been about it!